In 1994 he headed to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship earlier than returning to Australia in 1996 to take up the place of affiliate curator, then curator, of European artwork on the Artwork Gallery of South Australia. Whereas there he curated and wrote {the catalogue} for plenty of exhibitions, together with Bohemian London: Camden City and Bloomsbury Work and Love & Loss of life: Artwork within the Age of Queen Victoria.
He headed again to the US in 2003 and stayed for 11 blissful years as curator of work and sculpture on the Yale Centre for British Artwork in New Haven, Connecticut. It was there that he wrote the extremely praised A Transient Historical past of the Smile (2004), an concept that got here to him when he gave an after-dinner discuss at a dentists’ convention.
He was lured again to Australia in 2014 to take up the place of director on the Nationwide Portrait Gallery of Australia, in Canberra, which he stuffed till December 2018. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Angus oversaw the gallery’s twentieth anniversary celebrations, together with the bold 20/20 exhibition. Different exhibitions included So Superb: Modern Ladies Artists Make Australian Historical past; The Standard Pet Present; and Dempsey’s Individuals: a Folio of British Road Portraits 1824–1844. In 2016 he additionally bought the gallery employees shaking their booties within the worldwide Museum Dance-Off competitors (they didn’t win).
In 2016 he acquired for the gallery British artist Graham Sutherland’s oil portray Helena Rubinstein in a Pink Brocade Balenciaga Robe (1957). This nurtured his fascination with the Polish beauty queen’s obscure early profession in Australia and New Zealand, promoting overpriced pots of face cream to sun-damaged locals. It was a typical Trumble undertaking – a topic wealthy in each trivia and profound social and cultural commentary, with worldwide scope but microscopic and typically dotty anecdotes. On the time of his loss of life, he had written a manuscript of the key Rubinstein years and secured a ebook take care of Melbourne publishing agency Black Inc.
Angus’ final place in Canberra was as a senior analysis fellow in Australian Historical past on the Nationwide Museum of Australia, however he had plans to maneuver again to Melbourne, a metropolis he had left nearly 30 years beforehand. The final time his Melbourne associates noticed him was at an enormous dinner in Lygon Road, in September, to have fun the fellowship he had been awarded by his alma mater, Trinity School on the College of Melbourne. He will probably be sorely missed.